Flexible alerting is an available and popular telephone service. With flexible alerting, the members of a group of telephone stations are simultaneously alerted until one of these stations answers; thereafter, connections to the other stations are dropped. This arrangement is useful, for example, for a commuter who is anxious not to miss any calls and has flexible alerting for simultaneously alerting the commuter's office phone, cellular phone, and home phone. The commuter will answer whichever of these phones is available to him and connections to the other phones will be dropped.